Algorithmic Memory? Machinic Vision and Database Culture

This paper examines the material structures which support the sorting, searching and filtering of digital memories. Whilst accessible tools and cheap storage provide new opportunities to ‘cache’ one’s life, practices of editing and annotation are largely being replaced by passive accumulation. The problem of managing a snapshot collection which might number in the thousands has spawned the development of software interfaces in which the paradigm of the album has been reinvented as a database with a search field. Technologies such as automated image annotation and image retrieval promise to outsource the process of tagging, naming and organising memories to the computer, using complex algorithms to approximate a kind of ‘machinic vision’. This paper argues that far from representing the dematerialisation of the object, digitisation represents a significant shift in the way in which memory is constituted. Drawing on the field of software studies, the relationship of materiality to memory is problematised through an analysis of software and algorithm in the construction of digital memories.